One to watch: cloaking device that could turn people invisible

Plato’s Republic recounts the story of Gyges, a Lydian shepherd who finds a ring that allows him to sneak around unobserved and uses it to seduce the queen of his country, murder her husband and seize the throne for himself.

It is only now that technology has begun to catch up with ancient Greek myth. A cloaking device has made an object “fully” invisible for the first time, in a breakthrough that could pave the way for radar-proof stealth jets and effectively unhackable internet cables.

Temporarily tricking the naked eye is a relatively simple feat that has been mastered by magicians since the age of Houdini. The hard bit is not only sustaining the illusion in different settings but eluding detection by devices such as…

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